Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski has made an number of installations that speak of memorialising the dead. But unlike actual memorials, Boltanski's installations are made up of ephemera; rusted biscuit tins, electric lamps, old clothing etc, are grouped together into very powerful installation pieces. Some of the pieces are small; a number of empty tins stacked against a wall with a few photographic portraits of children placed on top. Each portrait has an electric lamp pivoted to shine a light directly into the face, partly obscuring the image. The empty tins a metaphor for some unnamed tragedy, the photographs plucked from obscurity, having little connection to real life events. Other installations are on a much larger scale. The work 'Personnes' uses old clothing placed face down into sectioned off grids to represent the dead or missing peoples from history. At the end of the gallery space a huge mound of clothes are sifted by a large claw.

Boltanski uses the technique of post-memory to make his work. The viewer does need to see real evidence of trauma and tragedy to know that it exists in the world. Besides, documentary practice can be highly biased with underlying agendas not immediately apparent to the viewer. Evidence can be selective to push a certain outcome that portrays history from a particular political angle.

It is worth noting that any attempt to question received wisdom around historical events can lead to very dangerous ground - such as Holocaust denial. It is important to distinguish between hate crimes like Holocaust denial and revisionist history, where attempts are made to re-evaluate facts in order to gain an insight that may not have been apparent or ignored or covered up by original historians at the time. An example of this is LGBT history, often obscured and ignored by historians and likewise colonialist and women's history where collective acts of political struggle or individual sacrifice are left to languish in the shadows.

Boltanski grew up after the Holocaust. The child of a Jewish father who had to hide under the floorboards to escape Nazi detection, Boltanski has no memories of these events except as passed down to him via his parents - post-memories. This fact does not stop the work from being highly emotive and thought provoking. The 'Past Lives' chapter in the book 'Family Frames: photography narrative and postmemory' by Marianne Hirsch states that:

"Boltanski's early work... is devoted to uncoupling any uncomplicated connection between photography and truth".

and goes on to say,

"Boltanski's lessons are not history lessons, they are lessons about mass destruction and the need to recall an irrecoverable past in the absence of precise knowledge about it."

My reading around the concept of post memory has brought to my attention the notion of an opaque barrier between memory and post memory. Post memory has difficult access to the events of the past when even documentary truth is disputed. For post memory work to be effective it needs to highlight this barrier. Boltanski's use of anonymous imagery and clothing takes this stance and reminds me of the work I am making into LGBT hidden Holocaust histories. Hardly any records of homosexual prisoners exist; all that survives is anecdote in biographies and scant documentation (some of which has been wilfully misinterpreted by past historians to eradicate their place in history).

Post memory is valuable tool when making work of this kind and I will continue to use it to explore the narratives when making new work.